Recovering NTFS external USB hard drive.

So my neighbor has contracted me to fix his computer. By fix he means remove all the shit aquired by downloading porn.wma.exe from limewire. He told me he just wanted all his music, photos, and documents out of his user folder. This should have been fucking easy considering he gave me a 500GB external Maxtor backup drive to put all his shit on. So I boot his computer up with Ubuntu and plug his external drive in. There was some dialog box that popped up that said the disk could only be mounted at the command prompt with the force option (great idea). So I did that, and backed up all of his documents.

Then I installed Fedora 8 on it to see how it would run on his older p4 and to see what stuff worked out of the box. After previous experiences with discreetly installing Linux on peoples computers, I decided to put Windows back on. I formatted his drive with Hirens Boot CD, and then installed windows.

I needed to get some drivers from the internet on my laptop running Ubuntu, so I plugged his drive into my laptop and got the same message as when it was plugged into his computer running Ubuntu off the disk. I mounted it with the force option, and started copying files. After all audible evidence of writing stopped, I simply unplugged the drive. Another great idea. When I plugged it into his, it could not be recognized and Windows ran extremely slowly until I unplugged the drive. I plugged the drive into my laptop and got an error saying there were possible hardware faults, and a few other things.

How the fuck can I retrieve the exact files this guy wanted me to save.

I have at my disposal:
Laptop running Ubuntu.
Desktop running Windows.
Laptop running Vista
Various live CDs that can be download off of the internet.

I just popped the case off the drive. Its a SATA drive, and I dont have any *working* hardware with a SATA port.

Here is my current plan: mess around with dd and hopefully not destroy something needed. Run the filecarver PhotoRec on the image and see what comes out. I set dd to copy the first 80 or so gigs off of the 500gb drive. He only had about 17 gigs of files on there. Hopefully they were all in the first 80 gb.